Remember when we had to figure out how to condense a 400-word press release into a 140 characters?

As daunting as that prospect seemed, eventually talented PR professionals became deft at the micro press release. Along the way, we learned an important lesson about brevity and the modern attention span.

But now we have a new challenge, the six-second video.

Last week, Twitter launched its Vine app, which lets you capture a six-second video that loops continuously. Twitter offers a brief tutorial on its blog.

The app is simple to set up if you already have a Twitter account—although it is not a prerequisite—and you can share your mini-film with your Twitter followers, your Facebook friends, and the Vine audience.

Brilliantly captivating, the six-second video format is both a challenge from a PR perspective and an opportunity.

You couldn’t embed your four-minute product demo video in Twitter. The best you could do was to link to it and hope that people would want to leave the platform and go watch it elsewhere. At this point you can add page loading time and video loading time to your four-minute production.

Few people are willing to wait those extra seconds for a product demo.

But think how often you’re willing to hit “play” on Facebook and watch videos. All sorts of videos you would otherwise ignore. Why? You needn’t go anywhere, and if the video turns out too boring to watch, you click stop and move on. No big deal.

Vine makes videos on Twitter no big deal. And at six-seconds, people don’t have time to turn off your demo before they’ve seen the whole thing.

It’s the video elevator pitch.

So what kind of content should you be thinking about for your six second PR video? Bev Yehuda, vice president of of Web engagement products for MultiVu, offered these suggestions:

Victoria Harres is PR Newswire’s director of audience development, and the primary voice behind the @PRNewswire presence on Twitter. A version of this story first appeared on the PR Newswire blog Beyond PR.